Using Storytelling for Trauma-Informed Pedagogy and Ethical ELA During COVID and Beyond by Leslie Burns

The Sunday Post on Ethical ELA is a year-long series featuring contributions from English language arts educator-scholars from across the country. In this series, we hope to expand notions of what secondary English language arts is, can do, and can be. Explore past posts on our “Teacher Ed” page.

Introduction – The Unbearable Traumas of COVID

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the first days of a new school year arrived for many with a sense of optimism, hope, and excitement about all the good things to come. School is such a central part of life in our society—a space in which most kids spend their childhoods learning and growing up. After summer breaks and months apart, everyone got a fresh chance to reconnect, explore, learn, play, and develop as human beings and members of society. This year is different. The pandemic continues to rage across our nation and our world. Covid-19 has disrupted our lives, and certainly the normal operation of our schools. The crisis has profoundly affected us all. Our students have suffered. We have all suffered. The kids are not alright.

As the National Education Association (2020) highlighted a year ago, children and young adults in the U.S. have been and remain trapped in a heart-wrenching and ongoing cycle of traumas—personal, familial, psychological, spiritual, social, and political. Many if not all have lost family members. Mothers and fathers. Brothers and sisters. Grandparents and cousins. Friends and neighbors. The youths in our classrooms have been forced to confront death in the most tragic ways possible. As if death were not trauma enough, students have lost their homes, their time, their peace of mind, their human relationships, and so much more. In ways we may never fully comprehend, our students—our children—return to school this year never having had a chance in nearly two years so far to grieve, rest, or re-connect in the secure knowledge that they, their loved ones, and their communities are safe. They are not. And with so much confusion, uncertainty, and fear from all quarters it is no surprise that the kids coming into our classrooms are confronting challenges that make our usual back-to-school goals of reading, writing, and arithmetic feel hollow. In times like these? They are.

There cannot be many who have not felt the terror. The children returning to their classrooms face profoundly uncertain times and troubles. At least some, along with their parents and relatives, have risked their lives every day to serve as essential workers who keep our grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, and other economic and social institutions open and functioning as best they can. Too many have seen their parents lose their jobs. Their families are coping with drastic losses of income. They have been evicted from their homes, and more face the terror of that eventuality every day. Our students have taken on parental roles for their siblings while their parents leave to work and pay bills that never stop coming. They have navigated school for over a year via cellphone screens, tablets, and laptop computers in spaces where they never have the comfort, stability, and human connections we know any learner needs in order to fully engage and participate in their own education. Some, especially those from impoverished neighborhoods, have been overwhelmed by inequalities and injustices related to simple access and opportunity to attend school. Many cannot afford the costs of Internet service and equipment required to participate “virtually.” And many of them have been blamed unfairly for that lack of opportunity and access.

The NEA rightly notes that our return to school during COVID “isn’t just about academics and ‘catching up.’ School leaders must first rebuild safe spaces for students that will help them and educators navigate the trauma they’ve experienced” (2020, para. 6). According to the NEA, 48 states and the District of Columbia closed their schools at some point during the 2019-2020 school year. Since then, students have experienced their schooling (and much of their lives) in isolation or (where possible) in socially-distanced spaces where authentic human contact isn’t possible most of the time. Isolation and alienation have taken a terrible toll. Clinical anxiety and depression are rampant. Economic hardships, health care disparities, and unrelenting stress have been compounded by the facts of racial strife, climate change, and sociopolitical tension in and around our communities. Suicides have spiked. We can’t afford to ignore the trauma we are all experiencing, certainly not for the sake of state standardized test scores required in the name of accountability. 

How can we provide our students (and ourselves as their teachers) with the safe spaces and inclusive communities they need to learn. How can we nurture and sustain them in this time of need? How can we humanize our students and ourselves even as we strive to teach literature and language for academic success? “‘We’ve had so many students who have fallen through the cracks who will be returning to school without any support,” says Kristine Argue-Mason, a leader in the Illinois Education Association. “That’s what we really need to be concerned about as we head back to school’” (2020, para.12). We do not yet know the intensity and scope of our students’ trauma, and we must not ignore the facts of our own traumas as teachers either. Educator Lee Starck reminds us, “Students aren’t the only ones in the school community who are coping with trauma…. We can’t be neglectful of our staff feeling whole as well” (para. 18). In the political push to close “academic gaps” and ensure our students are nominally “ready” for college and careers, I write this to remind us all that the old cliché is true: We do not teach subjects. We teach human beings.

 I know what the past 18 months have been like for me. I am traumatized too. A year ago this month, my brother died. Two years before that he slipped and fell, breaking his neck in six places. He was permanently paralyzed. Desperate to help him recover, my elderly parents sold their home and nearly everything they owned to help pay for his care. We loaded up all that was left of their lives and shipped it north to a retirement home near my house. We found a hospital that would give Chris a room and a bed while we worked to enroll him in cutting-edge therapies and research studies. But the week after my parents and brother arrived in my town with the wreckage of what used to be their lives, the COVID lockdown began. My parents were trapped in a small assisted-living unit where they were sent day-old food delivered in unmarked Styrofoam containers three times a day. No human contact. No activities. No services. No visitors. Nowhere to go. It wasn’t safe. They were alone and could not help their son. Chris was utterly left alone too, unable to move, suffering excruciating pain all day every day. No therapy. No mental health care. Nothing to do. No visitors allowed and not much of anything else except the many medications his doctors prescribed to manage his pain. He stayed in that hospital bed for nearly another year as we all lived in terror that he might contract the virus. 

In the end he caught pneumonia instead. By that time his body was too weakened by lack of treatment to fight back. Near the very end my father and I were allowed to visit. I sat with my big brother as much as I could. I played him the songs we grew up listening to together. We shared memories as best we could. It was difficult for him to breathe and speak. I delivered messages and letters from friends who sent their prayers, their blessings, their memories, their goodbyes. Their stories. There were times when I could not tell if Chris heard me through the fog of pain and pain killers. He made me promise to never let our stories die. Our stories were our Truths—as family, as siblings, as human beings. I promised, and I held my brother’s hand as the doctors disconnected the tubes from the machines that kept him alive. I stood aside as he said goodbye to our mom and dad. I stroked his hair. I told him he was not alone. I saw him take his last breath, and I saw him let go. I closed his clear blue eyes with my own hand, and mine was the last voice he heard: “I love you, Chris. I will always love you, brother. It’s time to rest now.” My brother didn’t die of COVID-19, but the pandemic killed him just the same. It will haunt us forever. He was my first and oldest friend, the one who was never not there. He shared my history completely. I closed his eyes, I kissed him, and the next day I had to go to work and teach my first classes of the fall semester as if it hadn’t happened.

Me and Chris, circa 1973

I don’t know how I made it. I have never felt so alone. Even though I went back to work, and even though I informed the people around me about what had happened, I did not share this true story with them. There was no space for it. It’s not that no one cared. Of course they did. But there was almost a code of silence, an unspoken agreement: “Don’t talk about sad things. Don’t let others see you struggle. Show grace. Keep calm and carry on.” It never felt safe to express my grief. Everyone around me was coping as best they could with their own traumas, after all. With nowhere to tell my story and feel heard, I did as best I could, which is to say not very well at all. And it didn’t have to be that way.

I know stories like this can feel taboo. Too sensitive and raw. Uncomfortable. Stories like mine can be traumatic for others. That is, in part, why this is the first time I’ve ever shared what happened in any detail. I didn’t want to cause harm or grief when there was already too much of both. But I wonder now what it could have been like if I’d created the space to reach out and share my story with the people around me and listen to their stories too. I wonder how much I lost the chance to heal through the empathy and community that sharing our actual stories might have provided to help me heal and move forward as an active participant in my life. By treating my story as taboo, I lost the chance to connect with the human beings around me. I lost the chance to feel and express distress and my fullest self. I lost so many opportunities to grow, find solace, and move forward. By offering my story now to anyone who reads this, I’m moving again. I’m becoming. I am stepping into the light. And just maybe I am connecting with others who will feel safe to share their own stories too so that they can find realize that they are not alone either. 

We are all going back to school again in a masked-up world, and too many of us still suffer in silence while we try to catch up, keep up, and survive under intense pressure. Plans for ensuring students achieve high scores on standardized tests have been rolled out by every school district and every state with demands for teachers and students to increase academic achievement. The pretense of business as usual cannot hold. The human stakes are too high.

Acknowledging Trauma in Our Classrooms

Despite the superficially rational impulses to focus on closing academic gaps and return to some mythical “normal” approach to classroom teaching, it is fundamentally important for educators, administrators, elected officials, and community stakeholders to understand that the students we work with every day are, just as rationally, not focused on or invested in academic learning right now. It’s not just that so many are mourning the loss of loved ones. They are mourning the loss of life as they once knew it. It might sound trifling to hear teenagers lament missing senior proms, or sporting events, or school musicals. But these are not trifling matters at all. Our students are mourning the loss of their literal rites of passage along with the emotional connections and memories that come with them. Those events and connections provide the social spaces for understanding, compassion, empathy, and memory that make up the very stuff of being in the world. Those lost memories are for many what makes childhood…well, childhood. In this time of ongoing and complicated trauma, ELA teachers must incorporate methods that help support and engage our students and ourselves as safe, valued, celebrated members in our classrooms.

Walker (2020) recommends seven basic principles for trauma-informed pedagogy that help students feel seen, included, and valued. These principles include:

• Ensuring students’ emotional, cognitive, physical, and interpersonal safety.
• Fostering trust and transparency through connection and communication.
• Facilitating peer-support and mutual self-help during classroom interactions.
•  Collaborating in and sharing decision-making processes with their teachers and each other.
• Empowering students’ voices and choices by helping them build on their strengths (rather than focusing on their deficits).
• Paying attention to cultural, racial, historical, gender, and sexuality issues inherent to our intersectional identities.
•  Imparting a sense of purpose, meaning, and worth to the things students read, write, think about, and talk about in order to learn and grow.

As Walker further notes, each of these trauma-informed principles is about making sure our students feel seen and understood. They help ensure every person in the room explicitly realizes their membership in the community we create with them. Walker also points out, as I have here, that teachers do more than impart information and skills. He writes, “We need to cultivate spaces where students are empowered to co-create meaning, purpose, and knowledge” in “a sanctuary [where] the path to learning is cloaked with radical hospitality and paved with hope and moral imagination” (para. 35).

Our students need space in our classrooms to share their stories and make meaning about who they are in this world and what they can do in it. Such as they were, our students’ stories have been interrupted and even violently dismantled. The stories we were all building and learning to tell about ourselves have been irrevocably altered, and story is everything when it comes to learning and being human. As author Patrick Rothfuss has said, “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” Those stories—our stories—are not just pleasant fictions. In her talk titled “Wired for Story,” Lisa Cron points out, “Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution—more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; Story told us what to hold on to. We don’t turn to Story to escape reality. We turn to Story to navigate reality.”

Video: TEDx Talk by Lisa Cron, “Wired for Story”

I suggest that storytelling is one method ethical ELA teachers can use to cultivate Walker’s “sanctuaries of radical hospitality” and provide students with opportunities to hold onto themselves, us, and one another as we all seek meaning, make light, and move forward. As we confront the challenges of returning to school, it is essential—crucial, imperative—that our main goal is not and must never be simply teaching academic content and skills. Yes, we have an obligation to do that. Yes, there is value in studying and using literature and film to read, write, think, and communicate. But before any of that work can be worthwhile, we must remember that our first work—our forever work—is helping our students feel safe. Supported. Included. Valued. Understood. Worthy. Able. Heard. Celebrated. Loved. I encourage and challenge us all to put our students’ humanity first and make their stories central to their learning, practice, and identities in ELA classrooms.

 Story Exchange as Method for Ethical ELA

Using storytelling as a basis for studying the language arts is not new. The use of narrative as a foundation for literacy curriculum and instruction has been recommended to foster reading ability, oral and written communication skills, identity construction, critical thinking, and provide opportunities to use literacy skills for inclusion, community building, and civic action (e.g., Perry, 2008; Phillips, 2010; Enciso, 2011). However, standards-based frameworks such as the Common Core or state instructional standards these days often subordinate narrative relative to argumentation frameworks designed to produce passive and analytic workers rather than active and expressive human beings. Consequently, teachers frequently treat storytelling as merely a strategy for engagement rather than an integral approach to making meaning and acting in the world.

Researchers have repeatedly found that narrative practices promote ethical outcomes in which teachers and learners use narratives from their lived experiences to not only learn skills but also practice literacy in useful ways toward personal agency and social action (e.g., Tatum, 2008; Mirra, 2018). It is worthwhile to explore how narrative-based literacy education provides an alternative that might increase literacy learning while also using such learning in ways that make education meaningful in the first place. Narrative-based instruction that centers learners’ funds of knowledge has the potential to frame empathy, inclusion, critical thinking, and humanization as fundamental outcomes of literacy education that lend themselves to civic action for social justice in both local and global contexts (North, 2006). But most importantly, storytelling allows us to commune with and understand each other in ways we all need right now.

One organization doing this work is Narrative 4 (N4), a global non-profit network of educators, students, and artists who “use art and storytelling to build empathy between students while equipping them to improve their communities and world.” Their core methodology, called story exchange, is designed to help students “understand that their voices, stories, actions, and lives matter, and that they have the power to change, rebuild, and revolutionize systems. N4 currently operates on four continents in sixteen countries and eighteen U.S. states. For more details about the organization’s approach and work, see https://narrative4.com/. 

Story exchange is just what it sounds like and offers a simple but powerful approach. A host teacher working with a Narrative 4 facilitator organizes participants, identifies objectives, ensures safety, and builds trust. Participants in a story exchange are provided with tailor-made prompts that invite them to tell stories from their lives (rather than about their lives) to a partner who will then share a story in return. There is no pressure to share tragedies or break taboos. Participants may share any story they feel is important to them and comfortable to share.The facilitator pairs students and provides them time to exchange stories, and guides participants to listen closely and carefully to what their partners say and mean. After a break during which students reflect on what they just listened to, the group reconvenes. Sitting in a circle, each participant is asked to retell their partner’s story using first-person perspective. Effectively, the listener from each story exchange is asked to assume the perspective of the storyteller and relate their partner’s narrative as faithfully and respectfully as possible. Each pair must truly consider what it was like to be the other person in their storytelling moment. After all of the stories have been exchanged and retold, the facilitator coaches the group to debrief together about the feelings, impact, and lessons they took away from the experience and then brings closure to the event. As Narrative 4 asserts, “The post-exchange reflection allows participants to consider what they’ve experienced and how they can build on it” (https://narrative4.com/about/our-work/). 

Narrative 4’s story exchange work is specifically designed to develop listening skills, promote peer-peer learning, cultivate public speaking skills, improve metacognition, and increase participants positive emotions. Here’s a brief video created by Narrative 4 to introduce their work and its potential.

Video: Narrative 4’s Story Exchange

As Narrative 4 co-founder Colum McCann says at the end of the video, story exchange opens the way for people to not just realize the value of their own stories, but to discover the values of the stories told by the people around them. Story exchange “builds upon ideas of peace, ideals of belonging, and ideas of becoming.” Designing a classroom in which our stories are the essential texts, we teachers can commune with our students to “live life out loud, be raw, be brave, and step into someone else’s shoes and see for a while what it’s like to be someone else,” as McCann exhorts us to do.

Through inquiry, reading, writing, oral, and multimodal communication, learners can use narrative practices like story exchange to co-construct knowledge, increase empathy and inclusion, and empower themselves in their communities to succeed in both school and life. As demonstrated by the work of Narrative 4 and other acclaimed story exchange-style programs such as National Public Radio’s renowned StoryCorps project, narrative-based practices help teachers and students breach the academic traditions of public schooling and more intentionally use literate skills to tell their own stories, using them in equitable, just, and meaningful ways to act. Story-based methods can result in increased learner feelings of acceptance, confidence, hope, interest, and pride. Further, story-based methods may decrease learners’ feelings of fear, anger, shame, boredom, discouragement, frustration, loneliness, and stress (Narrative 4, 2021). The potential of learner-centered and narrative-based curriculum to reduce stereotype threats and thereby expand students’ cognitive capacities is substantial. The approach enables us as teachers and co-learners with our students to value each other as community and find support as interconnected agents not only read the word and the world but also use our literate powers to identify, disrupt, and alter structures and systems of trauma and oppression (Friere and Macedo, 2005). And it starts in our own classrooms

 Conclusions – Stories Matter

This year, maybe more than ever before, our students need us to help them do more than learn about plot structure, theme, symbolism, grammar, syntax, and close reading skills. Our students need us to be present with them, to see them, to listen. They need us to share our stories too so they can understand that they are not alone, that we are all human, and that we rely on one another to not just get through this life but make it worth living. During a time when so much has been lost and so much more is at risk, I know I will be sharing stories in my own classroom this year. I’ll be teaching others how to do it too, and I hope you will join me. Narrative 4 and StoryCorps are just two among many organizations that offer methods for storytelling that can inform English education and make practicing language arts matter. Storytelling can help our students find confirmation, connection, and inclusion during a time when they need such radical hospitality more than ever. More than hospitality, storytelling in ELA can sustain us as teachers and help us truly join rather than merely lead in our classrooms. We can position both ourselves to use our funds of knowledge, act as primary knowers, and guarantee everyone has a voice to speak their truths and live out loud instead of suffering in silence.

I am not a religious person, but as I write this and think about the profound comfort and joy I have already witnessed since I found story exchange the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi springs to mind. I remember singing the words in my high school choir, and even as a teenager I was moved by their power:

Make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving each other our stories that we receive. It is in sharing with one another that we commune. And it is through communing that we learn how to be and live in the world. As we all go once more into the breach, let us share our stories and provide space for our students to share too. Let us recover ourselves and rely on our humanity to learn together in joyful noise. Our stories can light the way through this dark. Peace.

Author’s Bio

Leslie Burns is an Associate Professor of Literacy and the Program Chair of English Education at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. He has published in English Journal, English Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Teachers College Record, and the Harvard Education Review among other journals, and is the author of two books, Empowering Struggling Readers (with Leigh Hall and Elizabeth Carr-Edwards) and Teach on Purpose! (with Stergios Botzakis). His interests include curriculum theory and design for literacy and language arts, identity formation in English language arts classrooms, and social justice education. He lives with his wife Colleen, his son John Henry, and their cat Lily. He plays a funky bass guitar and is sometimes allowed to teach teachers how to teach English. You can reach him at l.burns@uky.edu. 

References

Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical inquiry, 18(1), 1-21.)

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (2005). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. New York: Routledge.

Enciso, P. (2011). Storytelling in critical literacy pedagogy: Removing the walls between immigrant and non-immigrant youth. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 10(1), 21-40.

Perry, K. H. (2008). From storytelling to writing: Transforming literacy practices among Sudanese refugees. Journal of Literacy Research, 40(3), 317-358.

Phillips, L. G. (2010). Social justice storytelling and young children’s active citizenship. Discourse Studies in the cultural politics of education, 31(3), 363-376.

Mirra, N. (2018). Educating for empathy: Literacy learning and civic engagement. New York: Teachers College Press.

Narrative 4. (2021). Supporting research. https://narrative4.com/about/our-work/. Retrieved July 28, 2021.

North, C. E. (2006). More than words? Delving into the substantive meaning (s) of “social justice” in education. Review of educational research, 76(4), 507-535.

Tatum, A. (2008). Toward a more anatomically complete model of literacy instruction: A focus on African American male adolescents and texts. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 155-180.